Searching Barcelona for the Third Phone

Samsung surprised no-one, but disappointed seemingly everyone, when it revealed that the shell of its flagship smart phone this year would again be made of plastic rather than something classier.
Photo: AP

Samsung surprised no-one, but disappointed seemingly everyone, when it revealed that the shell of its flagship smart phone this year would again be made of plastic rather than something classier.

HTC surprised no-one, but disappointed more than a few, when it failed to reveal the next version of its One phone, one of the classier phones on the market.

Apple surprised no-one when it didn’t turn up.

And thus status quo was maintained here in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the mobile telecommunications industry’s biggest annual trade show. And this year, like previous years, mobile telecommunications operators like Telstra and Optus came flocking to the show, hunting for something to upset that equilibrium.

The ZTE Open C, which runs the Firefox mobile OS, at MWC in Barcelona.
Photo: Reuters

Mobile operators are dying for a disruptive third major phone brand to emerge from a show like this. A senior Telstra official here said he hated dealing with Apple, which is notorious for its arrogance, and while he didn’t mind dealing with Samsung, he was getting nervous about how much power it had accrued.

Mobile operators need a new power to emerge, if only so they can use it as a stick to beat Samsung and Apple with.

And at this year’s Mobile World Congress, candidates were in abundance.

One of the most visible exhibitors at the show was Mozilla, the not-for-profit browser designer that has entered into the mobile phone business with Firefox OS, an operating system designed to run apps that use web-like programming techniques.

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Mozilla showed off a slew of Firefox OS phones at the show, including a phone that could sell for as little as $US25. But, as the starting price suggests, Firefox OS isn’t designed to compete directly with Samsung and Apple so much as provide a cheap smart phone for emerging markets now dominated by so-called “feature phones" that can do little but make calls and send and receive text messages.

Indeed, with affluent markets already saturated with smart phones, and with signs appearing here that innovation in high-end mobile phones has slowed to a crawl - Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 was widely criticised for being too much like the last one - this year’s Mobile World Congress was as much about chasing the next billion phone owners as it was about upgrading the first billion phone owners to the latest technology.

Nokia, one of the more likely candidates for that number three spot now that it has agreed to be acquired by Microsoft, chose to launch three phones here, the most expensive of which will sell for only €109.

The phones, known as Nokia X, X+ and XL, run a version of Android that’s designed to appeal to buyers of low-cost phones, yet act as a trojan horse for pricier Windows phones in years to come. Rather than store data on Google servers, the way regular Android phones do, Nokia’s Android phones store their data on Microsoft servers.

Nokia XL
Photo: AP

(Just where phone data is stored was, incidentally, another topic of this year’s Congress. Following revelations of the US government’s widespread snooping practices, a company called Geeksphone launched a phone called Blackphone, another Android-based phone that sends and stores data so its difficult for the NSA to intercept it.)

Such a strategy could help Nokia clear the pack vying for third spot, but only in terms of global market share, not in a way that could help mobile phone operators in developed countries like Australia.

And so it was something that wasn’t officially here at the show, HTC’s One 2 phone, that a lot of people were talking about. The Telstra official said he had seen that phone in private briefings with HTC, and it was the phone that most excited him out of everything he had seen this week. The rest of us will have to wait a few more weeks to see it.